1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to monitoring and controlling remote equipment and, in particular, to an improved system, method, and apparatus for command and control of electrical submersible pumps in oil wells via a host communication gateway to interface with a field device, remote terminal unit, or other instrumentation that operates across multiple communications infrastructures to a common back end data delivery system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The need for cost-effectively monitoring and controlling remotely-located oil wells has always been a challenge to the oil industry. Fortunately, recent technological innovations have significantly increased the efficiency with which such operations are managed. For example, a conventional or baseline installation incorporating a graphic motor switchboard or drive control system (GCS) 11 is shown in FIG. 1. In this installation illustrated, the GCS 11 is the primary control element. It is responsible for controlling components such as the downhole pump 13, motor 15, and associated tooling 17 (e.g., for gauging vibration, temperature, etc.), as well as gathering run time and operational information from these components.
The GCS 11 is typically a controller with Modbus protocol communication capabilities and offers an array of information that can be acquired via a Modbus interface. Modbus is an application layer messaging protocol at Level 7 of the OSI model (see, e.g., www.modbus.org). In a standard setup, the GCS 11 provides a standard Modbus RTU protocol 19 that supports, for example, a variety of function codes. The interface is typically run at, for example, 9600 baud and can provide a physical interface of either RS-232 or RS-485.
In this conventional network interface implementation, the GCS 11 is equipped to interface directly to any point in a multi-point Modbus host system 19 via a wired and wireless I/O interface 21 (and the like) to storage tanks 23 and other locations. The host system 19 issues a Modbus poll request for information from any of the GCS internal Modbus registers for subsequent display or application use. Commands to the GCS 11 are sent over the network in the same manner. However, this type of network topology does not lend itself well to the global communications (e.g., satellite) networks, and does not take full advantage of or leverage a TCP/IP based network infrastructure such as, for example, GEO VSAT, etc. Other limitations of this conventional Modbus poll/response network include: using the higher than necessary bandwidth, incapacity to be event driven, exclusively using the network medium, and being unable to offer authentication or encryption services. Thus, although conventional systems are workable an improved solution would be desirable.